Encourage children to help with meal prep while keeping hassles to a minimum with tips, equipment, and layout advice from designers and clever momsby Julie Scelfo

Keep It Organized

Celerie Kemble's three guidelines for designing a kid-friendly kitchen—organization, participation, and distraction—also apply to the equipment she recommends.

For organization, she suggests installing "as much storage as you can," including low cabinets where useful but clunky gadgets and appliances can be stored. Choose whatever cabinet style you want, but avoid shiny materials like glass or dark lacquer that show fingerprints, and soft woods such as cherry that are unforgiving when cereal bowls are dropped and Matchbox car accidents occur.

Keep Messes Hidden

"If you want the kitchen to look really clean and organized, don't have everything out on the counter," says Meg Rodgers.

Cabinets are good for concealing the riot of plastic lunchboxes, thermoses, and Tupperware that are part of family life. Do you have small appliances like mixers or blenders with an array of parts that don't stack neatly? Put them away in a drawer or cabinet so the clutter doesn't clutter your mood.

Hiding messes is why Celerie Kemble prefers "really deep" kitchen sinks such as Franke's Professional Series. "I don't like to see what's in it," she said.

Count on Your Counters

Countertops will take most of the beatings (and spills, and hot pans, not to mention scratches), so Meg Rodgers says don't install anything "that's so precious that you can't use it."

Instead, choose materials that are heat-, scratch-, and stain-resistant, such as granite, quartz composites, and stones like bluestone or slate.

Less common alternatives are also available: In her kitchen, Rodgers has a countertop made from stainless steel near the sink (which "gets more beautiful the more you use it," she says) and, where her family sits to eat, a section made from walnut. Although the wood shows nicks and scratches, maintenance is fairly simple. "We can sand it down and re-oil it," says Rodgers, who has this done once a year.

Don't Forget the Hardware

Although European-style built-in finger pulls are becoming increasingly popular, designers warn that they can collect food and dirt, and can make it difficult to open heavy doors on refrigerators or pull-out pantries.

Rodgers recommends instead using some kind of hardware, but selecting as minimal a design as possible. "There's enough going on in a kitchen with the appliances that detailed hardware becomes like having too much jewelry on," she says. One option she likes is a wooden knob painted the same color as the cabinets, or small metal pulls attached to the top or side edge of the doors that are barely visible.

Choose Tough Stuff

When it comes to selecting kitchen textiles, Celerie Kemble describes herself as "a big faux-leather fan" because the material adds deep colors to a room and is so easy to clean.

Any other fabric used in the kitchen must "be indestructible," Kemble says. For extra protection, cushions should be slipcovered in a fabric that can be "unzipped, taken off, and scrubbed."

Stay Grounded

While a popular trend in kitchen design is "everything getting higher and higher," Kemble, who is 5'6", says she prefers to keep things low, and tries to find kitchen tables no more than 29 inches tall. "I think it's so nice to sit down at something and feel tall," she says. "The lower the table, the more comfortable it feels to me." That effect is magnified for children, so why install an extra-tall counter or bar stools that will leave your kids' legs dangling?

Helping Hand

Keep a collapsible step stool on hand for when a small child needs a boost, or consider having stools or chairs that roll—as long as the wheels also lock.

Choose chairs or counter stools that are easy to move around, and, if you're lucky enough to have a dining table in your kitchen, Kemble recommends chairs that push all the way under so you don't have "a colossal cage of chair backs" eating up valuable space in passageways.

For an even easier way to get a boost, a pull-out step stool can be built right into the "kick" (the vertical band in the space between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor), although this will add to the cost.

Make It Easy on Yourself

Forget about spending money on hand-painted wallpaper: Kemble says, "The biggest luxury in the world" is a second dishwasher. "You know what? I can fill a dishwasher in one minute," she adds. To be able to put pots and pans in one and all the dishes in the other makes cleanup hassle-free.

Don't Forget the Small Stuff

From the time her children were little, Meg Rodgers has offered child-size aprons along with the adult versions, which helped make them feel they belong in the kitchen.

If you want to empower your children to cook, get them some tools that are the right size for their hands. For Small Hands, a store that sells Montessori classroom supplies for home use, offers an array of knives, spreaders, whisks, sifters, and other tools that are easier to wield than their adult-size counterparts.

Kemble has purchased an array of peelers, water pitchers, and other gadgets she might not need but are fun for kids to use. "They have an egg press thing so they can take a hard-boiled egg and cut it into little slices," she says.

Lela Rose says another reason to buy child-size kitchen tools is because they're safe. "I keep vegetable peelers, the little ones you can slide onto your fingers , all in drawers. They love those particular vegetable peelers because they can't hurt themselves with them."

Look Over Here!

To ensure she can get dinner on the table eventually, Celerie Kemble keeps some nonculinary supplies on hand as well. "If they're not helping me cook, I want to have things for them to do in the kitchen: sit and color, roll Play-Doh."

A column in Meg Rodgers kitchen holds a small pull-out television. She also has a large projection and movie screen hidden in the ceiling (in front of a big window) that pulls down for movie nights—and for occasions when they spend the entire day in the kitchen. "Sometimes if we are cooking a holiday meal, we might have a movie on at the same time so it's fun, it's entertaining."

Have Some Fun

Adults aren't the only ones who like gadgets. Do you enjoy making juice with a juicer? Have a homemade ice cream machine? Give kids a chance to use these gadgets and they, too, will get excited about cooking. Lela Rose still can't believe how much her son loves using their sous-vide machine. "Every single time we'll have steak, he'll say, 'Did you make it sous-vide?'" she says, incredulous. "My son is obsessed with sous-vide cooking."

Put Them to Work

Toy vacuum cleaners be damned! Kemble recommends purchasing real cleaning tools, like a little hand broom and dustpan, and keeping them in a designated area with other safe, nontoxic cleaning tools, like sponges and a spray bottle with water.

"It's not like you need to make some miniature mock-up for show," says Kemble. "Let your kids know they're participants. It's helpful: The more engaged your children are in the kitchen, the more they can be of assistance, and they feel so independent. They want to learn."

To that end, Kemble insists that when dinner is over, her children put their own dishes in the dishwasher. "Their dishes are their responsibility," she says. And they aren't big enough yet to reach the sink.